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Tesla's Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass (bloomberg.com)
Tesla is all set to cut the ribbon on a massive battery storage facility in the California desert -- the biggest of its kind on earth. It joins similarly huge facilities built by AES and Altagas, which are both set to launch around the same time. Combined, the plants constitute 15% of the battery storage installed globally last year. From a report: Tesla Motors is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one -- one that's been used to help justify the company's $5 billion factory near Reno, Nev. -- but batteries have so far only appeared in a handful of true, grid-scale pilot projects. That changes this week. Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that's just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. "It's sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at," he said. "Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it."
Don't forget that lithium ion batteries are about 85% efficient round-trip power where is nickel iron batteries are something more like 70%. That's double the energy loss in addition to requiring nearly 10 times the weight and volume. Nickel-iron batteries also need maintenance, that's cheaper than replacement, but it adds up over time.
What politicians normally do is submit a plan to an ethics review whereby their savings and investments are in a "blind trust" or equivalent. What this means is that they have no insight into where their money is invested ("blind"), and no control over the decisions that their trusted agent/broker makes regarding those investments, nor any communications with them apart from perfunctory statements or the like ("You currently have X dollars in your accounts" etc). This often involved selling off their existing assets to place them in that trust.
The problem with Trump is that he hasn't done this, and has shown absolutely no intention of doing so. He still knows where his money is invested, and still has control/influence over those investments. He claims that he doesn't, but it's grossly clear since his name is plastered all over it. What's more, it's his children that are now running the business, and if you think he couldn't quietly make his wishes known to them, you're deluding yourself. He therefore can easily take that information into account when he's making decisions, and directly benefit his own financial interests thereby.
To give an example, his travel/immigration ban covers several Middle Eastern countries, and cited terrorist attacks including 9/11 as cause. And yet, none of the countries the 9/11 hijackers came from are included in the ban. Why? Possibly because those countries happen to be ones that the Trump Organization does business in, since there's zero overlap between the banned country list and the list of countries in the Middle East where Trump's business has ties? Now, it's impossible to prove that was the reason why, but wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if we didn't have to even worry about that in the first place?
It sounds nice, but after 2 years, the capacity of the battery storage facility will be about 70% of what it is today and a couple of years later it will drop to 5%. Let's hope they built the facility with a user replaceable battery.
My 4 year old Tesla (car) battery is at 98% of new capacity, not 5%. Try again.
Well, there's Wikipedia...
The cell's energy is equal to the voltage times the charge. Each gram of lithium represents Faraday's constant/6.941 or 13,901 coulombs. At 3 V, this gives 41.7 kJ per gram of lithium, or 11.6 kWh per kg. This is a bit more than the heat of combustion of gasoline, but does not consider the other materials that go into a lithium battery and that make lithium batteries many times heavier per unit of energy.
There's a paper from a DOE lab that suggests:
On a per-unit-mass basis, the Evm values for battery production are quite large, especially when compared to the overall VMA burden. Indeed, the incremental manufacturing energy rate is 13.3 MJ/kg of vehicle whereas the values are 91 MJ/kg of Li-ion battery and 105 MJ/kg of NiMH battery (Burnham et al., 2006).
91MJ/kg for Li-ion battery manufacture to store 0.0417MJ/kg as of 2006. With 6,000 full discharge cycles, that's 250MJ of energy storage in its lifetime, or 2.75 times the energy required to make the battery itself.
It's ten years later; energy cost of Li-ion manufacturer has fallen with newer manufacture technology. Recent reports suggest anywhere from 6 to 10 times energy stored than used to create the damned things. Pumped storage (raising water behind a turbine) is 210:1 and adiabatic compressed air is 240:1.
It gets a bit worse than that: once a battery is expended, you need to remove and dispose of it. That means disassembly and recovery of the lithium, the housing, etc., along with transportation fees for the extreme weight of the thing. Adiabatic CAES requires recertification or replacement of storage tanks, hoses, fittings, pumps, and the like. The latter is going to be easier to improve than the former, so future CAES will likely be more-efficient and require less maintenance, and plants will benefit from these improvements as they upgrade tanks and turbines; future batteries will be more-efficient, but not likely to as great a degree--definitely not without inventing a whole new type of battery.
The actual cost is higher, too. Imagine the cost per kWh to stabilize a grid when you have to have people constantly remanufacturing and recovering batteries, as well as monitoring the station to make sure the battery bank isn't showing signs of failure which could lead to explosion. Compare that to the cost of people remanufacturing what is essentially a large structure (those tanks aren't going to be trucked in and bolted down; they'll be built on-site from plates and seals) 1/24 as often, and monitoring temperature and pressure for lower-criticality events (a damaged battery may run away and explode immediately; an overpressurized tank should have enough safety overhead and valves to fail more-slowly or, preferably, non-critically). It's not all about energy.
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Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes.
That number seems very low. Got a source?
I was wondering too and did some searching. It looks like the number is realistic. What I found...
I hope I didn't screw up the math. If I did, please ridicule me and mod me down....
Modern EV batteries which are temperature controlled and charge limited have, so far, shown extremely low degradation over 100,000K EV miles.
The owner of this Volt, who is a member of a Facebook Volt owner group claims to still get the EPA rated 35 miles per charge from his Volt after 120K EV miles...
http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...
I personally own a Volt with 32K EV miles and still get the same EV range...
http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...
One charge in a Gen1 Volt is about 10.5 kWh. This means that over 100K EV miles, a Volt battery stores in the neighborhood of 29 MWh of energy.
1/10 of that would by 2.9 MWh
A quick search shows 828MJ per kWh of capacity to produce a lithium ion battery pack. This equates to 3.68 MWh to produce a 16kwh Chevy Volt battery pack.
https://www.quora.com/How-much...
Given that those Volt battery packs have shown little to no degradation so far, it's safe to say they have quite a bit more useful life to go, so they will probably make it close to 36 MWh of lifetime storage, but they will eventually succumb to the laws of physics though and start to degrade.
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